Is The Shariah So Bad?

 

IS THE SHARIAH (ISLAMIC LAW) SO BAD?

 

 

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

 

It has been a tradition of ruthless prejudice in the West to vilify and condemn Islam.  It included everything to do with Islam, such as the Prophet sws, the Qur’an and the Islamic Law which is called the Shariah.

 

We have gave the reasons for such hostility to Islam elsewhere. But to recapitulate and not the least let any readers unaware of them know as well we can say this much:  The historically winning brand of Christianity (for initially there were more legitimate candidates which were based on the original Jerusalem Church under James the brother of Jesus himself which included all surviving disciples of the Christ), namely the alternative church based on and evolving from the teachings of Paul gained a footing in the Roman soil thanks to Paul’s inexorable Westward drive until he breathed his last in Rome the very capital of the ancient world’s greatest superpower.  The proud Romans and their even prouder mentors the Greeks both of whom loathed the Easterners first persecuted and practically exterminated all Eastern versions of Jesus followership and by the seventh century their brand of Christianity had become the Catholic (universal) Church and they regarded their civilisation the only true civilisation calling  those outside its rule barbarians. After achieving so much power and prominence at least in their own eyes the last thing they needed and could tolerate was another faith and civilisation laying claim to being the better faith and civilisation for all mankind.  It was exactly this which Islam was ‘guilty’ of!  

 

Just as the Greco-Romans were enjoying and savouring their victories and were cock-sure of their supremacy in all fields of human achievement an ‘upstart’ as they saw him, namely Muhammad rose up from the desert of Arabia which was the most unlikely and despised part of their world.   Initially dismissed as a transitory freak and irritant both at home and later beyond  he proved too brilliant and too fortunate to go away.  It was barely the end of the first third of the seventh century and a mere 20 years into his mission that Muhammad armies had reached the Byzantine (Roman) borders and pressing beyond unchallenged.  And it was barely the middle of the century that his successors had wrestled from them their whole African territories as well as all the Holy Land up to the Taurus Mountains, both geographically and spiritually-  most Christians inhabiting these lands were absorbed into the new faith.   And it didn’t stop there.  A few centuries more and Islam knocked on the gates of Paris and Rome in the West and Constantinople in the East which it eventually captured in 1453. 

 

It proved so invincible that it could  only arouse the most intense fear and hatred in the mind of the West who had not suffered  so decisive a reverse for so long in any of its encounters with the East.  Alexander had laid waste the Persian Empire and  had decisively reduced Mesopotamia and Egypt to total subjection to the Hellenic power.  The East had never in recorded history been able to both invade the West and remain there as its rulers.  The terrible Huns of Attila  from Central Asia had but briefly ruled there and left for where they came from within a generation.  It was the very first time in history that a power was able to invade, defeat and absorb a large and the best part of the West ruling its various parts  for up to eight centuries!  The responsible for this was Islam and personally Muhammad sws.  How could the West, given its Roman ungodliness thinly veiled by a Christian  godliness fail to fall into the phobia it fell into?   And the Shariah took its share of the hysterical condemnation of everything Islamic. WHAT IS MORE, WHEN SOME MUSLIMS FELT THAT THEY HAD BEEN LEFT NO OPTION BUT ADOPT THE WESTERN CIVILISATION THEY ADOPTED IT SO WHOLESALE THAT THE ADOPTION INCLUDED SOME OF ‘HATRED OF THINGS ISLAMIC’  AS WELL!

 

Not only that but they also adopted almost everything in the Western world which the West’s own good minds deplored having. 

 

This naturally extended to the Shariah.  Before we look into this matter further it is important to note that despite all the hostility the Shariah is almost 90%  in agreement with the Western laws in a general sense. Both equally recognise personal freedoms, free and liberal economic system, family obligations and the accountability of rulers.  So it could not be these that made the West displeased.  In fact until recently (say for the last three centuries or so and even much less in many Western countries) the Islamic world  was a much more liberal and humanitarian place to live; can you believe it-  in fact so better that Christians themselves led more prosperous lives and suffered less injustice and RELIGIOUS persecution there.  For example throughout the Ottoman centuries in the South East Europe, Hungarians, Poles etc  crossed over to the Ottoman territory to escape from the poverty and persecution inflicted on them by their lords and bishops.  They invariably found their brethren under muslim rule better off in every respect.  In other words the present immigration of peoples from east to west  was moving in the opposite direction during the Ottoman times until it was the 19. century when the Ottomans began to degenerate and the west improve for good.

 

 

MAJOR CONTROVERSIES

 

Believe it or not, almost all controversies about the Shariah has a sexual basis,  verifying Freud’s diagnosis that the Western mind, thanks to its Pauline Christian roots,  suffers from an almost incurable sexual hysteria. Let’s take the issues on which the Western legal judgment finds the Shariah culpable. They are polygamy, divorce, inheritance and testimony at court.  All have to do with sexual differences.  The only non-sexual   issue of controversy is the system of corporeal punishments. Hardly any other areas of the Shariah are taken into account or found fault with by the Islamophobes in the West and their imitators among the muslims. Let’s see each in that order and try to make objective judgments.

 

 

POLYGAMY 

 

Polygamy has been a voluntary (not compulsory) universal practice to this day and everywhere including the West if we define it realistically and broadly. It is that, barring reliable contraception which is very recent boon each encounter between a fertile male and female has the potential of making the female party pregnant.  Because in pregnancy and childbirth the woman is at her most vulnerable and in raising children at her weakest females are naturally and justly cautious about sex.  Their strongest instincts is to allow sex when they feel that the male they are to mate with will deliver them a high quality sperm and additionally will help in raising the offspring. This is what caused the institution of marriage to come about and almost universally adopted as the most useful form of producing new generations.  Women feel that the best sperm and most caring fatherhood  most possibly come from attractive men who are handsome, intelligent, strong, loving,  dexterous and prosperous. The more of these qualities are found in greater strength in a man the more women fall for him. Of course it is hardly ever the case that a man shall get full marks in all of them.  But every bit on display helps.  Because of the problems of pregnancy and looking after the offspring even most animal females are cautious about sex and routinely form ‘married’ couples. 

 

Many birds for example mate for life and the father helps in every way to look after the chicks.  Species as closely related as tigers and lions display totally different sexual relationships.  While usually the stronger and more skilful tigers can afford to lead separate (unmarried) lives with the tigresses acting as lone parents the lions live as extended families called prides where a lordly male is the husband of all fertile females and his sons are expelled from the family when they become fertile and begin to behave as sexual rivals.  For their part the stronger sons among the expelled fight for and get their own harems in time to repeat their fathers’ practices all of which are believed to improve the genetic quality of lion populations.  The same more or less apply to human beings. Within limits imposed by the social mores and laws males and females eye and pursue  to varying extents the members of the opposite sex.  Women generally do so with a view to get the highest quality sperm with best prospects of future fatherly support and as a result tries not to allow access to herself by any man except the coveted man. 

 

In other words she is interested in increasing her chances of happy motherhood.  Men on the other hand are instinctively  drawn to produce the greatest possible number of offspring because he has two incentives to do so. First,  his enjoyment of sex in essence costs him nothing then and afterwards.  He just delivers his semen and can just walk away relieved and happy.  He personally suffers   no after effects like pregnancy and childbirth nor, suckling.  Secondly, the more females he conquers the more chance to implant an offspring of highest possible quality for himself since among the females he impregnates the chance of hitting the ones with the highest quality genes  increases as their numbers increase.  It is this natural necessity of producing best possible quality of offspring from available females that impose on a group of animals their polygamous practices. In human societies the polygamous tendency of men are further augmented by the brutal realities of life.  Warfare until recently always decimated male population more than the female and the imbalance caused more than one female being available for surviving men.  The reproductive instinct is so strong among women themselves that when men are scarce most women are quite prepared to get impregnated by available men by any means- polygamous mating or sex outside marriage.  All interests taken into account, all societies found that polygamy is preferable to mating clandestinely without defined responsibilities.  Polygamy has been so natural and universal practice that outside the recent Western (AD centuries) civilisation it has never been associated with the slightest moral stigma.  On the contrary men were regarded as highly as the size of their harem while women could boast of being in the harem of such highly regarded husbands. Powerful and prosperous such lordly husbands both delivered to their wives, at least in theory,  the better genes and  ensured a lavish care of their children.  Current religions and cultures ensured that people looked at the matters in that spirit.

 

As for the West,  there polygamy was badly stigmatised and legally banned but that did not prevent a bit powerful enough western men practicing their own possible polygamy minus its blessings elsewhere.  Kings routinely debauched their fellow nobles’ women as far as they could and promotions much depended on the cuckholded husbands being good boys. Lords did the same with their subjects.  One particularly nasty tradition n was that ‘the right of first night’ whereby in any wedding, if he so wished the lord had the automatic right to deflower the bride in the first night of the wedding and then surrender her to the so-honoured husband.  In brief IN ALL SOCIETIES AND CULTURES TO THIS DAY ALL POWERFUL AND SEXUALLY STRONG MEN EASILY FOUND A WAY TO ENJOY AS MANY WOMEN AS THEY COULD GET,  PRODUCED MANY CHILDREN AS A RESULT WITH OR WITHOUT HAVING TO ACKNOWLEDGE LET ALONE LOOK AFTER THEM.  Only recently a powerful man died in the UK who had openly practiced  full-fledged, almost Biblical  polygamy with three admitted and  openly displayed women.  He looked after all three and the several children produced only too well as if he was an Abraham. In fact under the  at current English Law any man can mate with almost any woman provided mutual consent is there and set up  as many families as possible with them as possible under marriage provided he does not call the unions marriage and thereby fall foul with the law in  this most hypocritical of times.

 

All in all polygamy has been with us to this day and everywhere and at the present it is more possible and available in England for those who want and can afford it than it is in Saudi Arabia,  except that it mustn’t be admitted as such.   What a relief it would be its legalisation in this country for its powerful elites who could than bless as many ladies as willingly available and their children with their superb financial and social powers and save them the risks and costs of debauching the same women without much responsibility or pursuing  looser or more vulnerable women and becoming unnecessarily disgraced by being detected by the notoriously sly and cruel tabloids!   Lastly can you imagine. Although it is the Church that is most venomous against polygamy throughout Church history popes and bishops have hardly stayed behind other lords of the populace in ravishing women when opportunity presented itself and EVEN OPENLY KEEPING HAREMS.  There has been more than one popes who boasted of sons and daughters, each with his or her assets and power-base,  notwithstanding the fact that all Catholic priests had to be celibate, let alone their ‘holiest’ the pope brandishing a harem as openly as the sultan of Turkey!
This is the outcome of a totally unnatural principle whatever the vehemence of its deluded defenders.  The Nature wins in every instance and may even scandalise the principle’s chief defenders in their very home.

 

Before we move on to the subject of inheritance we may say a few sad things about the current sexual mores and modes in the West and the parts of the world tailing it.   The extreme prudery imposed on the actually only too prurient Western soul, thanks to what we may call ‘the law of the opposite effect’,  backfired so badly that the word sex and all the words (including  the four-letter) and forms of achieving an orgasm became the most popular words and subjects as well as marketing devices.  Pornography disguised as art, fashion, advertisement, science or education is the staple diet and bread and butter commodity of everything related to sales or popularity.  Under its overt and covert influence all ages and classes of people are saturated with sexual interests and obsessions and almost everybody became sexual targets for everybody else irrespective of sex or age.  Homosexuality, despite all its essential futility and great health risks,  has left the closet and became a boasted of ‘alternative’ while extensive rings of paedophilia, most regrettably among the high and the mighty (High bureaucracy of a European capital was recently exposed as deeply involved) and incestuous relationships are increasingly noticed and reported. According to one reputable paper one in three families in the UK may be affected by incest.  Every night and especially Saturdays teem with copulating stranger couples in dark corners, under stares or in toilets or some dark place in open air as if the whole country has become the engine room of a world-size ship with pistons constantly pumping, steaming and ejecting. From the prudery of equating that fully responsible polygamy with prostitution the Christian West has descended into the bottomless pit of all sex for all in all forms.   What a lesson!

 

 

DIVORCE

 

Originally and still in Catholicism the Western law did not allow divorce no matter what.  Now it does. Not only it does but it makes marriage less and less protected and attractive arrangement. It is as if an invisible clique of highly placed conspirators are looking for every way and taking every opportunity to discourage marriage and punish the married couple.  Divorce is getting increasingly easier as well as prevalent. Most marriages do not survive their first decade.  Those that do survive are often made meaningless by adultery on either or both sides.  Islamic law does not lead to such absurdities. It recognises that if a man does not want to stay married to a woman nothing can stop him from making life hell for his wife.  Given the sexual roles and liabilities of each sex it is obvious that it is the woman who needs stability more and therefore the less inclined to break up a marriage.  The recent so-called emancipation of women through birth control devices and equal opportunities in employment which distort this basic natural balance of power. When Islam came no such devices and policies could exist and it therefore prescribed for the natural condition.  But equally natural has been man’s own reluctance to break up his fruitful marriage because normally a man cared as much for his children’s happiness as their mother. What is more, contrary to traumatised feminist pessimism,  most man quickly fall under the spell of their wives simply because they are both habituated and addicted to female approval thanks to being raised by mothers who are the single most influential character in a man’s life. Exceptions do only prove the rule as the saying goes.  We therefore find in the literature of all nations and cultures writers complaining about the almost universal hen-peckedness of the husbands in their times. 

 

The very first muslims complained of it and nobody could do anything about it except call on the ladies not to be so ruthless.  The apparent male domination in all societies and cultures is just that-  apparent. The fact is that overall and on the average women are at least as influential as man but in their different way. What is more sobering, it is not only the husbands who are in love with their beautiful wives that are dominated by them.  Loved or unloved, beautiful or ugly most wives have an intimidating and checking effect on their husbands who after all have been the equally dominated sons of another woman, their mother.  An angry and accusing woman can make a man freeze with remorseful terror even when the poor chap didn’t do anything wrong.  The fact that the woman says so is often enough.  Therefore both for the formidable substitute-mother status of a wife and a normal man’s sense of responsibility towards his children is usually enough to stop him from divorcing his wife which fact has always been amply verified by the divorce rates in muslim countries. Compared with the Western  rate it is negligible among muslims as polygamy is rare. The first few men dare, the second few can afford.

 

INHERITANCE  

 

The Shariah is accused for giving women half the amount of inheritance given to men.  The critics forget that in Western tradition  it was women who paid men a marriage dowry while in Islam it is the man who pays it.  What is more, not only the dowry paid but every asset a Western woman had became her husband’s on marriage.  Therefore to find a husband Western women needed a lot of financial power to BUY him. Fathers naturally saw to that.  Under Islam on the other hand it has been the man who paid the dowry and while the assets the bride brought in remained hers and on divorce she could take them with her to the last penny.  So, while it was the Western woman who had to buy a husband it was the Muslim man who had to buy wife.  As the Western bride needed assets to do the purchase the Eastern man’s need for them was even greater. That is why there has been a counterbalancing difference between the Christian and Islamic inheritance laws.  Each law cannot be taken in isolation from the associated marriage obligations and it is fair to say that the Islamic form is the more sensible and equitable alternative. What is more, in many ways the Western law shifted to the muslim positions on the same issues which shows which is the more sensible. For example it did not allow divorce but now it allows,  it did not recognise woman’s right to property apart from husband’s but now it does… in all cases moving  towards the Islamic viewpoint.

 

Islamic inheritance laws have also many other superior features.  Unlike the Western, for example,  it ensures that assets are is more widely distributed  by naming a wider circle of recipients which includes even the local poor.  Additionally it limits legacies by will to a maximum of one third of the total estate thereby preventing the testator to give everything to one beneficiary and deprive the rest.  No theoretical beneficiary may be deprived of his or her share of the deceased’s estate because latter hated him or her.   Lastly wives or husbands do not get the lion’s share thereby reducing the shares of the off-spring and other blood relations.  In Western law however the owner of an estate can almost do any injustice and madness he or she wants, including willing all assets to t he feeding of cats or pigeons. When one is without the light of Islam no doubt one is left in the darkness of the ego.

 

 

TESTIMONY

 

Islamic Law is accused of counting two women witnesses as equal to one male witness.   The accusers forget that when Islam came most other cultures did not regard the testimony of women in any numbers as valid.  Secondly,  the main concern of justice should be just that-   resolve a dispute justly.  Women, whatever the beliefs and demands of we moderns,  have always played a subordinate role to men in the objective world, although as we have already said, they influenced and even dominated men in the world of emotions thanks to the overpowering matriarchal image they gained over men who always fed from their breasts,  grew in their laps and kissed or beaten into obedience in their sweet embrace.  But while men broke into the outer world and enriched themselves in worldly experiences like trades and politics women’s main occupation has been (let’s forget about the last century or so in the West) home-keeping and child-rearing.  Add to this the more enhanced emotionality of women and their vested interest in keeping their husbands and male relations happy and in becomes obvious that they couldn’t escape being more emotionally biased, analysis-wise more naïve as well as  more vulnerable to manipulation by their menfolk thanks to the objective power they held.  

 

Islam is realist enough not to be swayed by ideological patter which itself is a form of calcified prejudice  catering for the emotional needs of a suitably traumatised minority.  It may be natural for a sensitive woman who regards her experience with his father an oppression to projects her feelings to the whole world of male-female relations and as a result ending up as feminist and perhaps even a lesbian but serious, profound, universal and supra-sexual teachings like Islam cannot be blown off course by such small regional breezes.  I said supra-sexual because the first two believed-ins of Islam, namely God and God’s angels are above sex.  The male pronoun used for God (He) is just a convention reflecting man’s one-time almost universal primacy and since no major language to the best of our knowledge has personal third party singular pronoun in the neuter gender the pronoun ‘He’ had to be used.  For feminists to take this personally is a matter of emotional reaction and does not render God  male.  God is of equal distance from both sexes as well as equally accessible to and kind towards both.   The equation of two women witnesses to one man has been a realistic and pragmatic choice given all the conditions surrounding the two sexes.   Still, as already explained in other articles of ours (e.g. the New Way) Islam has an innate and in-built flexibility and adaptability in response to new realities and it is not unknown for some proper muslim judges regard some exceptional women’s testimony superior even to two men’s let alone the other way round. 

 

I don’t think that any reasonable and enlightened male judge can disagree that a female doctor or engineer, everything else equal, is less reliable a witness than an illiterate and  naïve labourer simply because the latter is male.  Among actual muslims a lot of misogyny does exist but that is a survival from pre-Islam and NOT part of Islam which still awaits its proper assimilation by its imperfect adherents.  Which means that as and when we have better educated and informed women the judicial bias towards men may be put aside in the interests of real justice as the bias itself was once upon a time intended for.  

 

 

CORPOREAL PUNISHMENTS 

 

These are called ‘Hodood’ in Islam (sing. ‘Hadd’).  They are: Retaliation in kind of bodily injuries, cutting off hand for theft,  execution for murder, adultery or apostasy.  Let’s take these in the order given.

 

Retaliation in kind has been part of all ancient penal justice systems because given the primitiveness of social organistion and the savagery of the times when men lived next to dangerous predators and violent deaths and mutilations were daily occurrences no other form of punishment was either deterrent enough nor conceivable or practicable. The Mosaic Law gave it Divine sanction  and although Christianity cut its ties from it, it invented even more violent punishments without minus the justice inherent in the Mosaic, however brutal.  Church laws burnt ‘heretics’ and ‘withches’ alike until barely two centuries ago while for quite a few centuries the infamous Inquisition knew no limit to its penal inventions. Tearing muscles from bones and breaking the latter with sledge hammers or the incredibly cruel water tortures…  all underlie the present blanket revulsion in the post-christian West  against corporeal and especially capital punishment. 

 

Just like in the case of sex the West had to make a radical about turn due to its remorse for going too far in the past. Which means that until recently the Islamic  penal practices looked laughably mild in comparison with the Western (Christian) yet today it is the Islamic that is condemned as the most barbaric.  One or two centuries is a very short time on the historical time scale and to start with Islamic Law the Shariah  hardly deserves to be seen as if it has been the harshest of laws.  What is more and as already repeatedly shown Islam has an innate and in-built flexibility and adaptability which enables it to shed its dead wood and grow new shoots more in tune with the times.  Both Allah (in the Qur’an) and His Messenger sws (In the Hadith) are known to haste to add after every penal prescription the advice that ‘ forgiving the offender and waiving the punishment leads to the victim’s own pardoning by Allah and great rewards in the hear after.  Death penalty could be transmuted to an as heavy a fine as the full blood money or as little as nothing depending on the bereaved next-of-kin’s  degree of kindness.  A prison term could also be added to the blood money payment.    The same encouragement for and avenue to leniency were provided against the  thief as well as the adulterer while illicit sex on the part of a person who never married was a public beating just to hurt but not kill or maime. 

 

The corporeal punishments were not ruled out for good because given the habits, attitudes and universal examples of the times too lenient prescriptions had no hope of succeeding in either deterrence or satisfying the victims natural desire for vengeance.  If anything Islam is based on realities and could only succeed  as a civilising teaching if cognisant of the realities. No society can be expected  to think and act beyond the universal ethos of his times  if it wants to be taken seriously, put its house in order and defend itself convincingly.  Still, Islam kept to its promise of flexibility and adaptability by enthusiastically encouraging forgiveness on the part of the offended which can be taken to indicate a lightening of punishments when the society becomes ready by high acculturation and spiritual enlightenment.  Saints almost routinely forgave their oppressors as the Prophet sws their ultimate teacher did.  The Prophet sws actively urged confessed adulterers to recant so as to escape execution by stoning and his true successor our master Ali ra is reported to have skilfully suggested a thief to change his story and avoid his hand being cut off which he did. Both the Prophet sws and his saintly followers kept indicating that the purpose behind the terrible corporeal punishments was to curb the too strong tendency among the then too barbaric society and as far as possible make exceptions when the people involved could be made to see the light.

 

For his part our master Umar tightened up the rules governing the mutilation of thieves so that the punishment could not be given too easily. Later rulers relaxed the rules and the follow up so much that despite their frequent occurrence capital offences except plain murder were punished with less severity and decades and sometimes a century had to pass before any hand chopping or adultery stoning was practiced. That does not mean that there were no great cruelties. There were but they were politically motivated like a ruler’s savaging of his rivals and rebels to keep his throne.  Which was a universal barbarity indulged in irrespective of what faith was professed. All in all we can say that Islam carries in it an unmistakeable evolutionary gene which should lead muslims, when they are culturally and psychologically ready to see the real purpose behind the penal deterrents in their Holy Law and like their  Prophet sws and his  true successors recognise the fact that the causes of most offences often include an element of ignorance and emotional immaturity in the culprit who is unable to resist a level of temptation as regards property, sex or offence-taking which the average citizen would find pathetic. 

 

For example, what average person would regard the appearance of a primary school girl at a relatively deserted spot temptation enough to rape and kill except the weak-minded and almost reptilian-brained brute?  The decent average person would simply ignore the child or if he saw a danger to her help her reach safety.  Again, what average citizen would kill an old lady for the few pounds in her bag or even take the money when she drops it unawares. Instead he or she would pick it up and give it to the old woman adding  kind words as well.  Lastly we must also appreciate that being immature enough to act meanly is not a privilege of an offender. Equally immature may be a victim not to forgive a culprit for even a slightly disrespectful remark and ask for his execution if possible.  In fact it is on record that some parents are as savage as maiming or even killing their children for offences any children may legitimately commit, like eating more sweets than allowed or pissing on the wrong place.   Men and women, whether offenders or victims  come in all shapes, sizes and qualities and no hard and fast rules for  severity or leniency of punishments can be drawn no matter what times or in what place we are living. Law and punishment shall always be part and parcel of social life and only realism may hope to succeed in keeping a society as safe as possible from its own potential evil. 

 

Islam introduced as great as realistically possible and advance in legal philosophy and penal practice its birth date allowed and it is up to muslims to grow spiritually so as to minimise both their offenders’ tendency to offend and their victims tendency to avenge.  It must be realised that in all men in all ages including the present an instinct for savagery lurks in the depths of their souls as amply and sadly proven by the atrocities committed more or less on the part of all combatants in the two world wars, the communist takeover of Russia and other lands and in the recent Balkan wars.

 

Religions like Islam should be understood in terms of their noblest aims and highest  potentials for good and their abuses in the past should not be used as a pretext to condemn them as if any of the modern ideologies were less abused. 
Islam has one and only one ultimate message: man either outgrows his reptilian brutality and ascends his potential godliness to become a centre of benevolence and service or he keeps offending with and suffering from crime until one last mishap destroys all. 

 

 

IF JUSTICE IS THE CRITERION

 

Suppose we see a child whose father, the only bread winner of the family loses an arm due to another man breaking it so badly that it had to be amputated.  The victim can no longer carry out his manual trade (say, he was a carpenter).   The culprit is arrested tried and given five years in prison.  The victim is left to his fate together with his family facing a bleak future if not starvation.  The victim’s only recourse to some form of compensation is suing the culprit but it will cost a lot of money and the culprit may not be in a position to pay any amount ordered  by the court. End of the matter.   What is more, the government arranges an amnesty or a parole board isuues a parole  and after serving only 14 months the culprit becomes a free man and follows his trade, feeds his family well.  Is this justice?  

 

We have another country however where any harm caused by one citizen to another carries not only a custodial sentence but a full compensation of the harm done.  If the culprit cannot pay the state, who is supposed to protect its citizens has to pay up.  Here the same victim could get a hefty sum for losing his livelihood and an even heftier sum for the distressing mutilation.   And to give another example.  In the first country a rich man, after working hard and with great intelligence marries his secretary but after a few months they find that the marriage isn’t working.  They decide to get a divorce.  The woman is given half of all the wealth of the man plus a life long astronomical alimony.  He feels ruined, the woman  suddenly, without working as hard and as long as one thousandth of the man, find herself a multi millonaire as if the man was the only party to enjoy the sex and the company.  In the other country however, the man has to agree with the woman a fixed dowry payable to her and if they are divorced the woman ends up only with the dowry received plus a limited  but adequate alimony until she re-marries.  Which is the juster country? The one which abandons crime victims to their fate and may pamper the oppresors by pampering them with comforts, ‘human rights’ and early release and perhaps rehabilitation grants as well?  The country when a woman divorcee robs her former husband of half of his life earnings just because they slept a few times in the matrimonial home and every time the man remarries and divorces he is robbed to the bone while  the mere sleepers-with are enriched like fat cats for no work done? 

 

Or is it the juster country the one in which the parties knoe in advance and agree what a divorce will cost  and the women are not automatically and astronomically enriched while men automatically and equally pauperised for just having gone through the same marriage? 

 

The first country is where modern Western laws are in force while the other is where Islamic law apply.  And these are only two examples. We have neither the scope nor the space to go all corresponding parts of the Shariah and Western laws but let these two suffice to show that Islamic Law isn’t the inferior law its detractors want to portray it.  Yes, originally it had to cater for the much simpler needs and near barbaric state of its clients and it appears to have both a primitive agenda and primitive measures to keep them in peace together.  But its principles as well as innate and built-in flexibilities and adaptability could, in good hands, make it evolve into best law humankind ever had.  That is not to say that by all standards a lot of its rulings are far superior to their corresponding numbers in the Western law.  They are, as proven by the two examples above. What is more, the majority of Islamic legal rulings are practically the same as the better rulings of the Western laws which again form the majority.  For even with a revealed core basis at the bottom of it, the Shariah as a whole with so voluminous detail is as much a human legal master work as any other system of law. 

 

Compared with the volume of the actual Shariah code sum total of the legal rulings in the Qur’an and RELIABLE Hadith will hardly fill a single small volume. Muslim jurist had to work for decades and then centuries to put flesh and fill with blood and infuse with movement and dexterity the legal skeleton provided by the Qur’an and the Hadith.  As such Islamic laws run into dozens if not hundreds of volumes dealing with a wealth of actual situations, precedents and nearly equally valid alternative rulings all based on arduous research, exertion of mind and experience. The flexibility is so pronounced that many rulings seem to contradict either the Qur’an or the Hadith or both if not looked deep enough.  The beautiful thing was that the so ruling jurists, at least the better ones, could convincingly defend their rulings by referring them to the spirit of the Qur’an and the Hadith. One example may be given from as early jurist as Umar the second caliph (ra).

 

In the Qur’an there is an explicit ruling that from the officially collected ‘zakat’ taxes a group of people termed “those whose hearts must be won to Islam” was to be getting stipends.  When the Prophet died he left a list of such payees which his first caliph Abu Bakr ra meticulously observed. But when Umar  came to power he not only refused to pay up those on the list but suspended the Qur’anic category of the payees altogether. He defended his ruling by insightfully reminding his equally pious and knowledgeable critics that the reason for the category was the initial weakness of Islam which needed friends from any quarter at any price. But “now it is Islam which is the stronger party and it is the turn of its enemies to win its friendship at any cost”.  His peers had to concede the logic.  Which showed that in the hands of Islam’s first and best generation it was the SPIRIT of Islam and not so much the literal wording of rules that mattered.  As long as and to the degree that this wise and correct attitude survived muslims displayed great legal genius and produced the best part of the Shariah code. When scholasticism, literality and dubiously motivated hair-splitting took over the code began to be flooded by lower and lower quality rulings and developed a thick and inflexible hide and became really hidebound.  Why many old-fashionedly trained ulama defend this resultant block of concrete is because they had to work to hard to master it which inspired them with an occult respect for it, too costly earned to scrap. 

 

This thick hide or bark has become so addictive a food with its sophisticated plays with words,  hair-splittings with Arabic etymologies,  its vast reference treasure like this from so and so and that from so and so…  and its infightings about sometimes far-fetched situation scenarios that they became drunken wit it and will feel robbed and orphaned, like fish out of water if even a dot is moved from it. This is not to say that then present code hasn’t got wonderful rulings difficult to improve upon or that the majority of basic rulings aren’t excellent. It only means that neither life stops to rule out the necessity of newer and more timely rulings nor legal genius can be regarded as exhausted with the departure of classical imams.  It is the Creator Who does and creates everything and to say that He will not create new things in need of new legal insights and rulings is a totally arbitrary and dangerous claim.

 

Lastly the PRACTICE of justice in Islam is potentially infinitely superior to the Western practice.  In the Western system many areas of justice is available only to the rich or even very rich. For some unintelligible reason we find a High Court case in England lasting two weeks cost several millions of pounds, sometimes to the contestants and at other times to the taxpayer!   How on earth the sitting of a salaried judge and attendance of the contestants and a few witnesses should cost millions of pounds defies logic.  Libel cases make a particularly nasty example.  A rich but mean man may libel a poor but honourable man  as badly and as extensively as he wants because the victim can only sue the culprit only at his own expense. I think presently the cost of just the opening the case at the High Court is equal to the cost of a big luxury car with far more costs to come like paying the lawyers each of which command fees almost no other professional can.  Additionally at the end of the day the losing side must foot the bill for the legal costs demanded by the court which often runs into millions.  Again what makes legal costs so astronomical is a mystery. With that amount one may have fund  hundreds of  major operations or build whole residential areas to house the poor.  For some reason the Western legal system is bleeding dry the society it professes to serve justice to.   Lawyers and law courts are so rapacious in billing the public that at least equally important forces of law like the police are starved of funds and most criminal activities remain beyond their means to tackle.

 

In Islam on the other hand justice is like NHS, fully public and free. Dare you to slander a fellow citizen and he just has to knock on the door of the qadi’s (muslim judge) and the next moment you are summoned under the threat of arrest to appear before the judge to defend yourself. You may be even the prime minister or the richest business-  if proven guilty you face exactly the same penalty as the street-sweeper- a public lashing.  Let me give a historical example. During caliph Umar’s time a certain arab king converted from Christianity (he was an ex-Byzantine vassal) was attending a hajj ceremony.  He was accidentally roughed by a fellow muslim because of the huge crowd’s sudden unpredictable waving. He turned around and slapped hard the innocent man right in the face.  The victim complained to Umar and the king admitted slapping him.  Umar ruled that the victim should slap the king back on the same spot with the same violence.  The king abandoned ship rushing back to his Christian sweet home.  In the past muslim suitors successfully sued KINGS and got their rights in courts presided over by a village qadi to whose presence the king had to and did come, respectfully as well as repentantly.  Judges employed experts at public expense to help solve technical problems and clarify disputed technicalities, summoned witnesses who HAD TO show up and acted both as prosecution and defence thus strarving out the costly parasite called a lawyer.  That did not mean that the loser who felt he was hard done had no access to remedy-  there were higher and higher courts all available to him at no cost except travelling etc. which costs the eventual loser had to pay up to the winner. 

 

In the West try to sue a powerful man.  The lawyers he hires are so ingenuous  and therefore so expensive that if you cannot afford an equally devastating lawyer or can only have yourself to argue your case your chances of success is next to zero and you are sure to be financially ruined at the end.  When the Western law is so power-dominated and selfish-motivated how can one expect its admirers and beneficiaries love the Shariah and the Islamic law system which will deprive them of all their kingly advantages over the lesser men?  Therefore they declare it primitive and even barbaric as if the getting away of the Western high and the mighty with their crimes against the weak masses isn’t barbarism enough.  It usually takes decades for the public to successfully, if at all, sue financial and industrial giants at whose disposal are satanically intelligent and skilful argument magicians and string-pullers. Supremely well-organised through secret brotherhoods and plain instinctual class solidarity and aided and abetted by the impossible costliness of legal processes the high and the mighty get only very occasionally punished,  get away with far less than they deserve and are often compensated by other lucrative rewards by their kind.  Among other  factors all such injustice benefits from the labyrinthine  structure and the astronomical costliness of the Western law enforcement system which Islam totally dispenses with.

Lastly, we do not deny that the Islamic system is not in need of a lot of modernisation both in content and procedure.  In the age of genetics and cyberspace as well as the sophistication of legal matters and issues thanks to the sophistication of the Western civilisation which is dominating the rest whether we like it or not we arguably need a lot of thinking to do. This includes encouraging leniency in matters of corporeal punishments which are already encouraged both by Allah in the Qur’an and by His Messenger sws through the many examples from his practice. He is known to have strongly advised some voluntary confessors to adultery to RETRACT the confession and keeping the affair secret go away and simply repent, implying that Allah may well forgive it which almost certainly meant  full forgiveness given Allah’s infinite mercy. We realise cultivation of lenient attitudes in a society imbued with millennia old phobias, prejudices and a belief in the efficacy of violence as remedy involves great efforts in public education and may cost great investment and take a long time. In the end the fact remains that Islamic law and its workings are juster, simpler,  and as such it is the overall clear winner. 

 

It is hoped that as muslims’ levels of education,  moral conditioning and training in manners improve they shall both sin and offend less on the one hand and be more lenient towards those who somehow fail in these respects and the general level and rate of both violent crime and violent punishment will fall and keep falling.  Whatever our understandings and wishes no society can be forced to feel and behave above its existing level of psychological maturity and spiritual enlightenment and it only backfires to try to impose on muslims Western laws and values which are anyhow often quite misguied and corrupting. It is up to the spiritually minded ulama (as distinct from formalist and literalist who are unable to transcend form and tradition and to outgrow a stern and grim religiosity obsessed with vengeance and hell as if they are the more satisfying  prospects to them as regards fellow men’s fate) to soften and mellow fellow their muslims by making them realise that all of us are weak and extremely fallible servants of Allah swt and the more we can forgive each other and the more Allah forgives the more of us each of us stand a better chance to go to the Garden than to the Fire. The stern muslim is stern because he wrongly thinks that he is saved and however harshly Allah treats men he will not end up among the punished.  Both his seeing himself safe and enjoying the thought of others’ whom he finds wanting in piety burning in Hell are sin enough and hateful to Allah more than other sins had he but knew.  Rather a truly Godly muslim out of his sheer realisation of Allah’s greatness and His infinite rights on him and his smallness and weakness in meeting Allah’s standards is so disappointed with himself and in such fear of Him Almighty that he much prefers for every other man’s being forgiven by Allah so that he also might cross the Bridge as the last lame pilgrim.  SUCH WERE ABU BAKR AND UMAR (ra) , for example and so should we be.  Let please Allah improve and forgive us all without exception. Amen.

 


 

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